


Love is a Shapeshifter

by sunflower123ink



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Metaphorical Murder, Metaphorical Suicide, Switching between first, a little bit of each, and third person, second
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27682487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflower123ink/pseuds/sunflower123ink
Summary: Love is so many different things. How do you know when it's changing you?
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	1. You

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is just a quick thing I did. I hope you guys like it. :) There, as always, is a more detailed A/N at the end. <3  
> (By the way, the pov switches between first, second and third person throughout this, hope you don't mind.)
> 
> Not beta'd  
> I do not own Harry Potter, its characters, its plot, or anything written by JKR.

What is love?

Love is looking into your eyes.

It is looking into your eyes and there aren't any stars or sparkling promises, there's just us.

Just us and love, and that's enough, I think.


	2. Fluttering

Love is fluttering. 

It's the fluttering of eyelashes over your face. It is the fluttering of butterfly kisses before sleep, and the fluttering of wings in your stomach whenever they smile, and say something particularly daring. It is the fluttering of breaths over lips and the fluttering of heartbeats in chests.

My heart is fluttering, it happens every time I look at your face. I'm pretty sure this is love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	3. Stutter

It is writer's block and a blank page. It is words fizzling out into nothing and popping like bubbles not yet formed. It is emptiness urging you to start something. It is standing on the edge of a cliff and you can't take a step because your feet are glued to the ground the same way your hands haven't clicked a key in over 20 minuets now. It is long lasting and exhausting and frustrating when your brain is moving so slowly.

It is your mind getting stuck. You stare at your computer and backspace on the words you just wrote. 

They wink and words stick like sludge to your lips, you stutter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	4. Thermostat

It is heat. It is a blanket in winter. It is flames burning and dragging across all of your senses, simmering down to the perfect temperature. It is either comforting or burning you alive, there isn't really an in between.

You grab my hand and it is a draping of warmth. Around my palm and across my cheeks.

Your teeth flash and flames lick up from the pit of my stomach, outward until they show on my face, across my nose and in the beaming bashfulness of my own grin.

You kiss my neck and I am on _fire._ That's love I think, the heat changing like a thermostat in a house full of kids.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	5. Scars

Love.

It is scars. Rippled tissue across a heart, unseen. The scars can show in other ways. In the tearing of eyes, in the flinching of hands. In the frowning of lips and the hesitance of trust. Scars are required when you love. It's not love unless they have taken a knife to your chest and mind and soul.

That's love, you know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	6. Forgotten

What is love, you wonder?

In the dead of night, staring at the ceiling there are no butterflies in your stomach, no fluttering across cheekbones, or comforting heats spreading over necks and ears. There is a longing, you know. The pain of the longing doesn't feel the same as the hurt of the scars.

What is love, you wonder.

Is it this, you think?

They drape an arm around your waist and bury their nose in your neck and you forget what question you were asking.

It lingers in the back of your mind, there to surface after their arm is removed, after their smile is small and their eyelashes don't brush your face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <33


	7. To Sigh

It is sighing. Love is to sigh. In wistfulness and in everything and anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	8. Brushing

It is brushing.  
The brushing of your hair, the strands being tugged gently by them. The brushing of lips over lips and cheeks and foreheads. The brushing of arms and fingertips as you walk side by side. Their secretive smile is tossed towards you and you think that their happiness and grin brushes against your heart, and infests you.

This is love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	9. Disposing Of

Love, is murder.

Love is to kill, it is to get rid of those who are threats. It is dangerous. It takes your emotions and twists them until they can not be reasoned with. Until you are capable of running a knife through another's chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	10. Committing Your Own Murder

Love is suicide. It is murdering yourself in the most brutally slow and harmful way. It is allowing yourself to be hanged and to suffocate whilst incisions are made along your body. It is tying the noose and standing on the chair and leaving a sharp object out in front of your place, and baring your body like an offering for its art.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	11. An Ache.

It is the worst type of aching. It is the bruises around your wrists throbbing, the finger marks on your waist reminding you of stolen moments hidden in corners and with the memories comes aching. Not a pain from your hands prodding the colors on your hips, but a different sort. The worst sort. The type of aching that is inside of you. The type that you can't reach. It fills you up from your head to your toes and makes you suffocate for longer and harder than a coarse rope ever could. It centers on your chest and beats louder than your heart. You don't hear it, but you can taste it on your teeth, and lips, and tongue, and feel it pulling inside you. 

It makes you want to grow out your nails and to claw at your chest until it is raw and bleeding, scratched open and stinging. The scratches don't ache, and even if they did, they couldn't compare to the aching that you can feel in places that can't be reached. It is the worst type of aching because it hurts so good, in that way that makes you want to curl your toes and do stupid things like scream at people or kiss them. 

It hurts a bit more because it is someone else making the ache. Shaping it like putty or molding with their hands, shaping you. Making it with their soft fingertips and slightly calloused palms, and long fingers with bony knuckles that curl around the clay like they curl around your hands, and they make it _ache._ Make you dig your nails into your palms and sit in a bath with all your clothes on pondering how to get it out of you and…

And if you even want to. Of course you do, you want to cut open your own chest and carve around your ribcage with your own hands before withdrawing your heart, because you won't be able to find the ache sitting in your bones, even though it feels like it's made a home in the marrow, but you can take the heart. You can pick up your heart and allow it to beat while you suffocate, with a rope signing your death sentence.

It's not a rope, it's never been a noose. It's their hands, their nice, pretty, hands that carefully crafted your ache, that are wrapped around your throat. And it's not an unidentifiable ache that you taste on your teeth and your tongue and your lips, it is them. 

Maybe you don't want to. Maybe if you get to keep their taste on your lips, and if you are allowed to continue to swallow them down, and maybe if you get to keep their smell in your lungs. It's your favorite smell and you think it's like nicotine, you think you need to inhale it a certain number of times or you might go into withdrawal. Maybe, if you are allowed to keep the brush of dry lips over your cheeks, and if the arms around your waist stay, then maybe, the ache is okay. Maybe the ache just needs to be fed, fed butterfly kisses and fluttering and heat and words and maybe it needs to be called _love,_ and _darling,_ and even _sweetheart,_ which you claim to dislike because of that condescending tone they say it in.

Maybe the ache just needs them. They are the ones who made it after all. 

And maybe when the ache has had its fill it will disappear and no more people will need to be killed. Not even yourself, though perhaps a grave is alright if it is shared with them

Not forever though, you know the ache will not be gone forever. Because love is greedy, and that is something you already knew, before the handprints on your inner thighs and the devouring of mouths told you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	12. I Love You

Love is pain, is hurt.

Love is death, is suicide.

Love is killing yourself.

To love is to murder and poison everyone and everything around you, including you. You perhaps worst of all.

It is to die.

And to love every moment of it with the aching sort of passion that brings people to their knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope it was decent :)  
> <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I have for some reason a whole lot of works that could me multi-chaptered with a genuine plot, except I only have one chapter for each of them unfortunately. Trying hard to have some semblance of imagination so I can get a story uploaded. I hope you enjoyed this little...thing. I haven't posted anything in ages, other than slightly editing the three other works on this page.  
> <3


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